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Chronicles: Former Dunbar High has remarkable run in athletic competition

The Dunbar High School football team about 1940 wore uniforms and helmets passed down to them by Lubbock High School. (Provided by Southwest Collection/Texas Tech)

Edward C. “Prof” Struggs, here with his wife Lillian Struggs, was the principal at Dunbar high School for about 30 years. (Provided by Southwest Collection/Texas Tech)

Damon Hill Sr.—Damon “Professor” Hill was head football, basketball and track coach at Dunbar, and he organized the National Honor Society at the school. (Provided by Southwest Collection/Texas Tech)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Caprock Chronicles is written or edited by Paul Carlson, emeritus professor of history at Texas Tech. This week’s essay reviews Lubbock’s former Dunbar High School’s state championships in the segregated, but defunct, Prairie View Interscholastic League.

The former Dunbar High School in Lubbock enjoyed an enviable record in academics and athletics. Indeed, in football, basketball and track the school won several state championships.

In 1920, a small school for African-American children opened in the Flats neighborhood — the first school in Lubbock for black students. Three years later, citizens led by Will Sedberry and Oscar Iles built a school in the same area at 17th Street and Avenue C.

A few years later students and officials named the school for Paul Laurence Dunbar, an American poet, novelist and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the first black American poets to gain national recognition, Dunbar died from tuberculosis at age 34.

Enough students attended Dunbar School that officials expanded the building in 1928. William H. Wilson (the principal), Mrs. Wilson and Ella Carruthers (who married Oscar Iles) had been the teachers since 1923. In 1930, they taught 227 students.

Edward C. “Prof” Struggs became principle in 1930, and he moved to add grades 11 and 12, thus making Dunbar a four-year high school. Two years later the school held its first high school graduation.

Also in 1932, officials relocated Dunbar to a new building on East 26th Street and Date Avenue. Attendance continued to grow through the next two decades, and in 1948 about 873 students enrolled for the fall term.

Shortly afterward, the still-segregated school began a remarkable run in athletic competition — all of it in the Prairie View Interscholastic League.

Called the Texas Interscholastic League of Colored Schools when it was founded in 1920, the organization in 1923 came under the authority of Prairie View A&M College and became the PVIL.

Dunbar was a 3A school, which represented the largest schools in the PVIL. It won its first state basketball championship in 1953 by beating Odessa Blackshear 67-53 in the title game.

The 1956-57 school year was an exceptional one for Dunbar High. It won the state basketball title, defeating Baytown Carver 98-79, and, according to Katie Parks, the state track title later in the spring.

Because Dunbar was experiencing an increase in student enrollment, Lubbock Independent School District officials in 1959 completed a new high school building in the Manhattan Heights Addition at East 28th Street and Teak Avenue. They also transferred the Dunbar name to the modern structure.

The former Dunbar building at East 23rd and Date Avenue became Iles Elementary School.

In the early 1960s, the Panthers, as the team’s nickname and mascot were called, claimed several additional state athletic championships.

In 1960, its basketball team beat Houston Elmore 74-71 for the state 3A title.

Afterward, Dunbar dropped to division 2A. But, as a 2A school in 1962, its basketball team won the state championship by beating Galena Park Fidelity Manor 63-52 in the final game, and in the spring its track team, according to Parks, secured the state track title.

During the next term, the fall of 1962, Dunbar’s football team, wearing used uniforms handed down from Lubbock High School, lost to Wharton Trainer 40 to 6 in the championship game.

But, in the spring of 1963, the Panthers won, according to Parks, its second straight state 2A track title.

In the fall of 1963, after having lost in the title game the previous autumn, Dunbar secured the state football championship by defeating Conroe Washington 19-14 in the title game.

A year and a half later, in 1965, its basketball team won its fifth state title by defeating Cartage Turner 82-66 in the final game.

Finally, according to Parks, during the 1967-68 school year, Dunbar won its fourth state track championship.

About that time, desegregation of schools in Lubbock had begun, and in 1970 Dunbar High School was integrated. By then, the PVIL had disbanded and its schools had joined the University Interscholastic League.

In 1978, Dunbar became Dunbar-Struggs Junior and Senior High School. It graduated its last class in 1993.

Today, the building houses the Dunbar College Preparatory Academy.

During most of the championship seasons, Prof Struggs was principal at Dunbar. George Scott was head football coach from 1953 to 1964 during the championship runs.

For many years Damon “Professor” Hill, Sr. coached football, basketball and track, but Ernest P. Mallory was coach of most of the championship basketball teams.

One of Dunbar’s outstanding athletes was O. D. Gary, a 1955 graduate. Named to the all-state team, he helped lead Dunbar to its first basketball championship in 1953. Curtis Gipson was captain of the 1953 team, and later he was a coach at Dunbar. William Malone was the Panther’s star player on the 1960 title team.

Clearly, Lubbock’s Dunbar High School compiled a remarkable athletic record. Over a period of 15 years, from 1953 to 1968, its students and coaches recorded 11 state athletic championships in the all-black Prairie View Interscholastic League.